Mutual Regard: The Photographs of David Halliday

Photography is the most popular of all the arts. This was true even before cellphones and the digital revolution had given us the means to capture appealing or arresting things we encountered as we moved through our daily round. Precisely because there are so many photographic images flooding the magazines and the electronic miniverse, it becomes harder to hold out special favor for those that in fact do have all the qualities we expect in a complete work of art.

David Halliday sets himself apart from the bulk of contemporary photographic practice in several ways. Along with Aaron Rose and Sally Mann, he is one of the art photographers to have resisted adopting the new digital technology that produces instant color images. He develops his silver gelatin prints by hand, and his only technical departure from the standard black-and-white approach is to tone his pictures with sepia. Doing so connects him with the Photo-Secession movement launched by Alfred Stieglitz just over a century ago, when, in a different context, photographers with serious artistic goals tried to distinguish their work from aesthetically deficient examples of photography dominating the market in that day. Stieglitz’s associates were also trying to equal or surpass the quality of turn-of-the-century painting, which, in 1905, meant avoiding the documentary, signboard realism characteristic of most non-portrait photography of the era immediately preceding them. They wanted to prove that photography was indeed an art, and that its images could embody qualities of design and subtle evocation as successfully as Impressionist painting did.

As painting underwent and reflected the political and technological shocks of the 20th century, art photography, too, moved away from the Photo-Secessionist ideal toward something more startling and abrasive, often serving social causes by documenting human suffering in various parts of the globe. Surrealist photographers stage-managed and manipulated their pictures so as to produce imagery that seemed to belong to the uncanny arena of dreams or nightmares. Halliday, though he recalls the meditative refinement of the Photo-Secessionists, has drawn as well on Surrealist aesthetics to arrive at his imagery.

Though his pictures represent real objects and contexts, they also have a speculative, dreamlike dimension—a quality most apparent in the still-life series of small, foursquare photographs showing objects at rest in a box, the main light source a circular “window” on the right-hand side.The sheer, inexplicable persistence involved in making several dozen pictures in this format would count as part of their overall strangeness. Meanwhile, the small container used in the series reminds us of a theatrical proscenium or else Joseph Cornell’s celebrated “shadow-boxes,” prime works of the dreamlike imagination.On this miniature, artificial stage, Halliday places fruits, vegetables or animals that, once withdrawn from Nature and thrust into this unnatural context, are transformed into dramatic characters whose purposes remain unfathomable, no matter how sharply delineated their form.

The result can breathe with an unearthly tranquility, as in Pesca I More/ Peach and Blackberries, which looks like a social gathering, the participants in this instance pieces of fruit rendered in delicate light. Pictures can also verge on the nightmarish, as in Pulpo/Octopus, which gives us a sagging mass of sinister-looking flesh, complete with gleaming suckers. Just possibly Halliday wanted us to recall here the octopus’s cousin the squid, which was the original source for the sepia ink used to tone photographs in the 19th century.

Though Halliday does make portraits and studies of the human figure, his more characteristic subject matter is the inanimate world. And yet a paradox arises here. The designation “still life” implicitly suggests one of the goals of both painters and photographers dedicated to the genre: they want to imbue the inanimate objects they depict with the vibrancy of life despite the immobility of the medium.  Like the great painters of still life—Zurbarán, Chardin, Cézanne, Morandi—Halliday charges his fruits, vegetables, and other objects with a poised intensity that intrigues us partly because possible meanings are just out of reach.